A spokeswoman for the Nubarashen prison in Yerevan told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that the 65-year-old Ashot Knyazian was pronounced dead on Monday. His death was apparently caused by a heart attack, she said, citing the preliminary conclusion of doctors.
Knyazian was one of the five gunmen who burst into the National Assembly and sprayed it with bullets on October 27, 1999. Then Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisian, parliament speaker Karen Demirchian and six other officials were killed in the shooting spree that thrust Armenia’s government into turmoil.
The gunmen were led by Nairi Hunanian, an obscure former journalist who accused the government of corruption and misrule and called for regime change. They surrendered to police after overnight negotiations with then President Robert Kocharian.
Several other men were also arrested in the following days. One of them, Norayr Yeghiazarian, was charged with supplying weapons to the armed group, which also comprised Hunanian’s younger brother Karen and uncle Vram Galstian.
Yeghiazarian was found dead in pre-trial detention in 2000. Law-enforcement authorities said at the time that he accidentally electrocuted himself to death while using a heating stove in his cell.
Galstian was found hanged in his Nubarashen prison cell in 2004 just months after an Armenian court sentenced him, the Hunanian brothers and the two other gunmen to life imprisonment. The prison administration said he committed suicide. Another jailed attacker, Eduard Grigorian, died in 2017.
Another man, Hamlet Stepanian, was sentenced in 2003 to 14 years in prison on charges of helping the gunmen enter the parliament. Stepanian died in prison in 2010.
Hunanian insisted during his and his henchmen’s marathon trial that he himself had decided to seize the parliament without anybody's orders. But some relatives and supporters of the assassinated officials still believe that the attackers had powerful sponsors in or outside Armenia.
In 2004, investigators formally stopped looking for other individuals possibly involved in the attack, citing a lack of evidence. Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General overturned that decision in 2019 one year after the “velvet revolution” that brought Nikol Pashinian to power.
The embattled prime minister pledged to find and punish “organizers” of the killings when he campaigned for the 2021 parliamentary elections. He pointed the finger at Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian, another former president now leading a major opposition group. The investigators have not backed up Pashinian’s allegations or charged anyone else with masterminding the parliament shootings.
Anahit Bakhshian, the widow of slain parliament vice-speaker Yuri Bakhshian, on Wednesday accused Pashinian of breaking his pledge, saying that “nothing has been done so far to solve that case.”
“My faith and trust in today's government and Nikol Pashinian in particular has run out,” said Bakhshian.